Greg Olear: Merrick Garland and the democracy-killing sound of silence.

[jalan48]

2. I agree with Olear on this.

To his credit, Garland appears to be more adaptable than Mueller and Comey. This past Friday, perhaps bowing to public pressure, he gave a policy address, the first of his tenure, on how he intends to protect voting rights at the DOJ. The remarks delivered that day are well worth reading, as he provides a history of U.S. voter suppression that does not shy away from the white supremacist fuckery that went on for decades after Reconstruction.

This was a nice start, but we need more. We need Garland to talk about the Insurrection, the previous administration’s sabotage of the pandemic response, and the revelation that Trump used the Justice Department to spy on his political rivals (a topic he covered yesterday, albeit in private meetings with members of the press). We need him to talk to us often, as Roosevelt did during the war, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo did during the quarantine. We have been through major collective trauma because of Trump. We need reassurance by our nation’s top lawman that he appreciates the urgency of the moment, and that the villains who did so much damage to our country won’t get away with it.

This is an information war. The good guys are losing. The sooner the Attorney General understands this, the more swiftly justice will come. Democracy dies not in darkness, but in silence. Sometimes even quiet killers have to make a little noise.